


survivors' guilt

by The_Eclectic_Bookworm



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-18
Updated: 2018-08-18
Packaged: 2019-06-29 01:56:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15719562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Eclectic_Bookworm/pseuds/The_Eclectic_Bookworm
Summary: Giles is killed by Angelus. Buffy and Ms. Calendar could both be handling it a lot better.





	survivors' guilt

No one ever thinks for a moment that Ms. Calendar killed Giles. For one thing, Ms. Calendar’s like a head shorter than Giles even in her clunky heels; there’s no way she could snap his neck so cleanly and so precisely. For another, when Ms. Calendar finds Giles’s body, the first thing she does is call the police, and when they show up, she’s just—lying on the bed next to him, shaking. Like she wants to be close to him but doesn’t know how she can possibly manage it anymore—which is a fucked up metaphor for the last few weeks, in Buffy’s opinion.

Right now, they’re all clustered in Ms. Calendar’s small living room. Xander is silently drinking a cup of tea. Willow, who had sobbed all the way over in the car, is shaking in Oz’s arms. Buffy, numb, disbelieving, is replaying that moment in the car, over and over again, in her head: _all you will get from me is my support and my respect._ She can’t stop thinking that she should have told him she loved him. She can’t stop thinking about _all_ the things she thought she was going to have time to tell him.

At the front door, Ms. Calendar is gathering the last of the roses into a trash bag. Her hands are scratched, badly, from the thorns and from the broken glass in her bedroom, and the roses are continuing to tear at her palms.

“Ms. Calendar,” says Buffy. It’s the only thing she can think to do, now, because—all she’s thinking about is Giles’s desperate sadness, these last few months, and how he could have been with the person he loved if Buffy hadn’t been so fucking _angry._ So fucking _stupid._ “I’m sor—I’m so sorry.”

Ms. Calendar doesn’t give any sign of having heard Buffy. She raises her hands, letting the roses fall, and quietly massages her temples, leaving streaks of blood on her face.

* * *

 

The funeral is a quiet affair. A bunch of people fly over from England and cry a lot, and Buffy feels strange and disconnected from the whole thing. These feel like the kind of people who Giles should have been able to gently introduce her to, in that way he did that made her feel included and almost loved, but Giles is in a closed casket and everyone’s talking amongst themselves and making speeches about someone Buffy doesn’t know. Rupert, according to a gorgeous and red-eyed woman who looks _way_ too young to be his aunt, had a habit of playing with his food when he was young, and he had a collection of planes he used to run around the house (Giles, running?), and he was an impulsive yet ultimately very compassionate young man.

Ms. Calendar leaves after two minutes. Buffy finds her dry-heaving in a crypt.

“That’s not fair,” Buffy says, but she’s too tired to be angry. All that stupid stuff about Angel seems ultimately irrelevant now that Giles is dead. “We’re supposed to stay, and you get to skip out? This is hard on all of us.”

“It should have been me,” says Ms. Calendar, straightening up and dusting off her long black dress. As casually as if she hasn’t said something so fundamentally disturbing that Buffy wants to start throwing up too, now. “I should have been—Angelus knew what I was trying to do. He was trying to scare me off. He wouldn’t have been dead if—I should have just fucking _died,_ ” and here her voice comes out almost a sob. Buffy doesn’t know this, but this is the closest she will get to seeing Ms. Calendar cry for a very long time.

“What were you doing?” Buffy asks, though she isn’t really all that curious.

“I wanted to try and give Angel back his soul,” says Ms. Calendar. “He didn’t like that.”

Buffy stares at Ms. Calendar. She thinks about all those sharp insults and barbed comments and half-violent brush-offs given to Ms. Calendar. She thinks about what it would take for someone to take all of that, without complaint, and work day and night to bring something good to the people who had cast her out. She thinks about how much Ms. Calendar must have loved all of them, and how easy it was for all of them to believe that Ms. Calendar hadn’t cared about any of them at all.

“This is my fault,” she says. “You wouldn’t have had to—it’s my fault.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” says Ms. Calendar, and leaves the crypt without attempting to comfort Buffy at all. Buffy sinks down to sit in the dust, among the dead, and thinks about how Giles always managed to find time for a gentle word, a helping hand. Still, she can’t cry; none of this seems _real._ There has to be some kind of a catch, somewhere.

* * *

 

There isn’t a catch. Life goes on. Buffy is assigned a new Watcher who exists only in her peripheral, because he isn’t Giles. New Watcher seems frustrated with the fact that she barely speaks to him, but he’s satisfied by her regular patrols and her training and her skill, and he tolerates the help of her friends, and Giles is dead.

Ms. Calendar doesn’t show up in the library anymore. Buffy sees her in the hallways, on occasion, looking strange and pale, almost ghostly. Willow says that her classes have become less animated, that she usually just gives them an assignment and spends the whole time buried in old books. Buffy, who is still thinking about that one time Giles taught her how to throw a punch without chipping her nail polish (then painted her nails like a pro), doesn’t care enough about Ms. Calendar to pursue this.

Ms. Calendar feels like a physical representation of the fact that Buffy _kept_ Giles from being happy. They could have had more than the possibility of being together again if Buffy had gotten the fuck _over_ herself and just—just told Giles that it wasn’t Ms. Calendar’s fault. It had been Buffy’s fault from the get-go, they all knew that, but it had felt like a weight off of Buffy’s chest to blame Ms. Calendar, and—where had that gotten her, anyway? A dead Watcher who spent the last weeks of his life made miserable by how much he loved someone. He had deserved a better Slayer than Buffy.

Buffy meets Ms. Calendar again, one night, up on the roof when she’s looking for any vamps that might have snuck onto campus while she was training with New Watcher. Ms. Calendar is sitting with Giles’s jacket draped over her shoulders and a cup of lukewarm coffee in her hands, staring out and up at the sky with the same detached expression she’d been wearing since Giles’s death. Buffy had always secretly thought of Ms. Calendar as cold, distant, but now she _desperately_ misses those bright smiles Ms. Calendar would flash when she was so proud of the Scoobies she could burst.

“Hi,” says Buffy, and sits down next to her.

Ms. Calendar says, “Rupert told me once that he used to—when he was working at the British Museum, he used to sneak up and look at the stars and think _someone out there I haven’t met yet, they’re looking up at the same sky and just waiting for me._ And then he said that I was that person, and I told him he was being overly romantic, and he said that I was completely right, he just liked the way I blushed when he told me how much I meant to him.” She smiles a little, a fragile thing, like she doesn’t even realize she’s doing it. “He knew me better than I did, I think,” she says.

Buffy moves a little closer. “Did he ever paint your nails?” she asks.

“Once or twice,” says Ms. Calendar.

“What color?”

“Glittery pink,” says Ms. Calendar. “I told him I’d scratch his face off if he ever did it again.”

This entire conversation feels as though Buffy’s just been punched in the chest, but it also feels like the most concrete and honest thing that’s happened since Giles’s death. “You know he’d have done something awful if it _had_ been you,” she says, because it needs saying. “He’d probably have…I don’t know, gone after Angelus himself.”

Ms. Calendar flinches and her face closes up. “I wouldn’t have wanted that,” she says stiffly.

“No, I—” Buffy first swallows, then sniffles. “I just mean that he loved you so much,” she says. “And I’m so sorry that I didn’t—that I wasn’t—”

Ms. Calendar doesn’t look at Buffy, but her arm goes out and around Buffy’s shoulders. They look up at the sky. “Rupert’s favorite constellation was Gemini,” she says. “He said he always hated how lonely all of the constellations seemed, but Gemini was two people and not one.”

“Twins,” says Buffy.

“Yeah,” says Ms. Calendar. “I told him that they probably had a lot of sibling rivalries.”

Buffy laughs. It’s a hollow, tired sound that surprises her a little. “My mom always says that she’s glad I’m an only child,” she said. “I don’t think I could have ever handled having any sibling.”

“Oh, siblings are the _worst,_ ” says Ms. Calendar. She still isn’t smiling, but—there’s a familiar, tentative softness to her face, one that Buffy remembers from days she’d seen Ms. Calendar giving Willow extra credit work. “I grew up with five million billion cousins, and—” She stops.

“What?”

“I haven’t spoken to my family since Angelus,” says Ms. Calendar. “They think my judgment is impaired, and that I care more about love than vengeance.”

“Do you?”

“I don’t know,” says Ms. Calendar.

Angelus is dead. This is something that Buffy doesn’t know how to bring up to Ms. Calendar just yet, because she doesn’t know how Ms. Calendar will react to the news. The night that Giles died, Buffy went to the factory and killed Angelus, and it felt better than anything she’d ever known in that moment. She spent the next day sobbing uncontrollably and thinking about the way it had felt to kiss Angel. Her mother had thought she was sick. Buffy hadn’t disputed this.

“I would want Angelus dead,” says Ms. Calendar. “But I know what Angel means to you.” The words seem like they are taking a physical toll on her, like someone is ripping her to pieces as she speaks. “We can work—I mean, I finished the ritual—”

“He’s dead,” says Buffy impassively.

Ms. Calendar’s arm stiffens around her shoulder. “Good,” she says finally. They watch the sky.

* * *

 

Buffy finds herself up on that roof with Ms. Calendar more often than training with New Watcher. He blusters and lectures and makes threats, and Buffy listens blankly, and then she heads up to the roof again to sit and talk with Ms. Calendar. They don’t talk outside of the roof—they don’t even make eye contact when passing in the halls—but up on the roof, Buffy settles herself next to Ms. Calendar and feels _understood._

Buffy’s mom doesn’t understand. She doesn’t know what Giles meant to Buffy, and doesn’t get why Buffy is so subdued, so different. She wants to know if Buffy needs therapy again, if Buffy wants to see a doctor, if there’s something that _happened_ that needs motherly love and attention, and Buffy can’t tell her, because Giles told her that secrecy was tantamount and Buffy has to honor every single piece of Giles left in the world.

“Yeah,” says Ms. Calendar when Buffy tells her this. Today, she looks paler, thinner. Buffy thinks it must be a trick of the light. “I know—I mean, I understand. There are things Rupert told me that I don’t think I can ever tell anyone.”

Were it someone else, Buffy would be curious and angry about knowledge withheld. But she remembers the way Giles would touch Ms. Calendar’s elbow to get her attention, the way they communicated near-wordlessly in the library and stepped quietly into his office to talk. Ms. Calendar has a right to that piece of Giles, because Giles loved her enough to trust her—that, or he trusted her enough to love her. Either way, it’s good enough for her.

“I really, really loved him,” says Ms. Calendar. “Like—god, how often does that kind of love come along? And for someone like me?” She never sounds completely connected to the world, these days, but when she says something like this, there’s at least a trace of pain and emotion in her voice. It comforts Buffy. “I never loved _anyone,_ ” says Ms. Calendar. “I was too scared.”

“I was in love with Angel,” says Buffy. “He’s dead too, now.”

Ms. Calendar’s face tightens. For a moment, Buffy thinks that she’s angry at the mention of Angel, but then Ms. Calendar makes this pained noise and grasps Buffy’s shoulder tightly. “You are too young and too kind to have to feel this kind of stuff,” she says. “I’m going to make things right, Buffy, I really am.”

Buffy will always remember this as the moment that should have sent up a thousand and one little warning flags— _danger, danger, unstable choices ahead—_ but she is young and trusting and grieving and tired, and Ms. Calendar is the only person in this entire world who she feels even slightly connected to anymore. Willow and Xander try, they do, and if she had enough energy she would love them for it, but no one understands this kind of bottomless grief quite as well as the only other person who loved Giles just as much, if differently. “Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

Ms. Calendar is looking at Buffy with bright eyes. She looks present. She looks almost as she did before Giles died, in this moment. “I have some stuff to do,” she says, and brushes a quiet kiss against Buffy’s forehead. She squeezes Buffy’s shoulder again, then leaves.

Buffy is left on the roof with her Slayer senses telling her that something is wrong, but her Slayer senses have been telling her that something is wrong ever since Ms. Calendar told her that Giles had been killed. She stays out on the roof until the chill finally begins to get to her, and then she goes back to get yelled at by New Watcher again.

* * *

 

Someone has stolen three books from the school library, and Wesley Wyndam-Pryce is frustrated by this. It’s difficult enough to have a coolly disinterested Slayer who rarely, if ever, does what she is told, and now he’s missing valuable research material? It’s necromancy—dark stuff—so it’s unlikely that he’ll need it in the future, but it still bothers him to see empty spaces on the shelves. He shoves a few extra books in from his own personal collection and doesn’t think about it until the sky goes dark on Wednesday.

* * *

 

Jenny is out sick.

Angelus is dead, killing Angel, who saved her life when she was rotting from the inside out. Her lover is dead, someone who had made her feel…connected, in the way she’d always sought through technopaganism and finally found in him. The world is falling to bits as the Slayer grieves, the deaths are mounting, the vampires are rising, and there is only one clear and true way to fix something like this.

They tell you, when talking of necromancy, that only one who has died of mystical causes can be truly brought back. The thing about necromancy that they don’t tell you is this: if done properly, a sacrifice of equal or greater value to the life taken can restore anyone from the grave.

Jenny knows this, and Jenny knows the kind of joy Rupert’s return would bring. She is not afraid. She is a brave woman, and she is a woman in love, and she is the most dangerous thing in the world at this moment, because she would rip time and space apart to bring Rupert Giles back.

* * *

 

The sky goes dark, as though someone has sucked out the blue, when Xander, Willow, and Oz are eating in the courtyard. Buffy isn’t with them (Buffy is rarely with them, as of late) and as such, this frightens them as much as it does everyone else, because they don’t know what’s going on.

“Buffy will take care of it,” says Willow, her voice high and terrified. In the dark, she clutches at Oz, twining her arms around his neck, and he holds her tightly. “Buffy takes care of things like this.”

* * *

 

Buffy sets out to find Ms. Calendar. Screw that New Watcher, he doesn’t know anything about anything, and keeps on bleating about irregularities and unusual occurrences like he can’t believe the sky would have the audacity to go against his five thousand lunar charts. It reminds her of all the worst parts of Giles. She gets a flashlight and steals New Watcher’s car, driving with her heart in her throat. None of the streetlights are on, and she feels as though she’ll be jumped by a vampire any minute now.

As she drives past a cemetery, she sees the flickering beginnings of a blood-red light in one of the mausoleums, a light that makes her skin crawl and her Slayer-senses tingle. Buffy takes a steadying breath (strange, how much safer these things felt with Giles or Willow or Xander at her side) and then she stops the car, holding the flashlight as though it’s a deadly weapon. She wishes she’d thought to bring along a stake or something.

The darkness is clawing and oppressive. It doesn’t feel like a normal night sky, under which one’s eyes will eventually adjust. Buffy can’t see _anything_ outside the narrow beam of her flashlight, and even this light falters as she gets closer and closer to the mausoleum.

There’s a presence, here, one that doesn’t seem evil but also _definitely_ doesn’t seem good. Buffy swallows hard, clenches her hands around the flashlight, and then opens the door.

Ms. Calendar is standing in the middle of the mausoleum, a circle of sigils and symbols surrounding her. Cupped in her hands is what looks like a small ceramic bowl, filled to the brim with that blood-red light. Or, no, not light, not at its core—

“Buffy,” says Ms. Calendar. She doesn’t move. “You shouldn’t be here.”

Buffy knows she should be angry, or feel betrayed, because whatever Ms. Calendar’s doing definitely isn’t of the good. But anger continues to elude her, looking at how fragile and pale Ms. Calendar is, and all she can manage is a tired resignation. “This is just the way my life is going, isn’t it?” she says to no one in particular. Then, to Ms. Calendar, “What are you doing?”

“I’m bringing him back,” says Ms. Calendar.

It takes Buffy a moment to realize what Ms. Calendar means. “You’re bringing him back?” she echoes, and she feels a flicker of hope in her chest. Giles back means—order. Calm. Normalcy. Giles wouldn’t stand for creeping darkness or blood-red light or Ms. Calendar looking so terrible, and sure, they’d have to readjust, but there was still so much she had to _tell_ him— “I can help,” she says.

“No, you can’t,” says Ms. Calendar flatly. “This is something that I’m doing alone.”

“Like  _hell_ it is!”

Buffy’s fury surprises both of them, it seems, because Ms. Calendar’s eyes open wide and her lips part, and Buffy—Buffy is reeling with the force of her anger. “You think you get to bring him back all by yourself?” she shouts. “You think you’re the one who gets to make some stupid romantic gesture like you’re the only one who loves him enough to—”

“To do what needs to be done!” Ms. Calendar’s shouting too, now, and she drops the bowl. It hovers in midair, waiting, as she crosses the room to stop right where the circle ends, standing on the other side of the line. There are tears in her eyes. “You don’t know—you don’t _know_ how much it hurts.”

“That’s stupid and you know it,” says Buffy fiercely. “Why do you think we’ve been able to talk to each other? Because we _know._ Because we’re the only two people who loved him _that much,_ and we have to deal with that, and _no one else does._ ”

“So deal with it,” says Ms. Calendar. “I’m bringing him back. This isn’t a competition to prove who loves him most—”

“You seem to think it is!” Buffy snaps.

“You’re missing the _point,_ ” says Ms. Calendar, plaintive, wheedling. “He’s going to be back. Rupert’s going to be back. He’s needed here so much more than I am.”

Something about that phrasing, the glint in Ms. Calendar’s eye, starts a thousand and one alarm bells ringing in Buffy’s head. It feels much too late. “We need you here,” she says slowly, but both of them know it isn’t as convincing as it needs to be.

“No,” says Ms. Calendar. “If he had to choose between you and me, here, you know he would choose you. He needs you here, and the world needs him too.”

This is such a phenomenally stupid idea for so many reasons, but the prospect of having Giles back is tantalizing and dizzying, making it hard for Buffy to argue her case against Ms. Calendar. She hates herself for that. “He wouldn’t want you to do this,” she says finally. “It’d eat him alive.”

“I’m not going to have to be here for that,” says Ms. Calendar.

Buffy stares at her. “You’re opting out,” she says, disgusted. “You’d rather him be alive and _wracked_ with guilt over you? You _know_ he’d have rather died than see you dead, you _know_ that! He spent the last three weeks of his life _miserable_ because he couldn’t be with you—”

“I don’t care,” says Ms. Calendar. It sounds as if she’s shattering as she speaks. “I don’t care. I would rather die knowing he’ll be safe than live knowing my _idiocy_ led to his _death._ You don’t get to act like you know anything at all, not when you will _never_ have to live with the fact that his death was your _fault—_ ”

Buffy lunges. She knows it’s stupid and she knows she shouldn’t hurt Ms. Calendar but she is just so _fucking angry_ because how _dare_ Ms. Calendar _stand there_ saying that Buffy doesn’t know what that guilt feels like, what that _anguish_ feels like, if Buffy hadn’t been the kind of girl to sleep with someone on a stupid, stupid impulse, Giles would still be _alive_ —

* * *

 

Ms. Calendar is sobbing.

Buffy doesn’t think she’s ever seen Ms. Calendar really cry. Ms. Calendar didn’t cry at the funeral, she didn’t cry when she found Giles’s dead body, but she’s crying so hard now that she can’t even speak. The sunlight is filtering in through the mausoleum windows, the sigils smudged, the ceramic bowl shattered. Ms. Calendar’s blood has spilled amidst the shards.

Buffy thinks she’s going to cry, too, and soon. She also thinks she might have broken Ms. Calendar’s wrist in their struggle. “Hold on,” she says. Her voice catches as she moves towards Ms. Calendar, gently removing Ms. Calendar’s hands from her face.

“Don’t,” sobs Ms. Calendar. “God. He’d _hate_ what I’ve become.”

“No,” says Buffy, reaching up to push Ms. Calendar’s hair away from her face. “You know he never would.”

Ms. Calendar swallows. There are tears collecting on her eyelashes. “I think we’ve been enabling each other, a little,” she says, and she sounds a little more like the Ms. Calendar that Buffy remembers. “He’s dead, you know.”

“Yeah,” says Buffy. Then, “I think I broke your wrist.”

Ms. Calendar shakes her wrist a little, then winces. “Sprained, at best,” she says, and tries to smile. “You broke the spell.”

“Messed up the sigils.”

“Yeah.”

“Would you have done it?” They’re sitting the way they always have, shoulder-to-shoulder, leaning against the wall of the mausoleum and facing the graves.

“Yeah, I think so,” says Ms. Calendar. “Part of me still really wants to go through with it.”

“But?”

“He wouldn’t be able to live with himself,” says Ms. Calendar. “Knowing I’d die for him. He’d have that hanging over him for the rest of—for always. I could never—I can’t do that to Rupert.”

Buffy lets her head rest on Ms. Calendar’s shoulder. “I miss him so much,” she says.

“It wasn’t your fault,” says Ms. Calendar, but it doesn’t sound like a dismissal, anymore. It sounds—teacherly. Gentle. Buffy had forgotten that Ms. Calendar could be gentle. “You know that, don’t you? You loved and you lost and you did stupid, stupid stuff, but I did too, and—” She exhales shakily, then says with some reluctance, “and it wasn’t my fault e-either.”

“No, it wasn’t,” says Buffy. “You were trying to help. You couldn’t have known—”

Ms. Calendar starts crying again. It isn’t the uncontrolled sobbing that had made Buffy stop and pull back from her furious attack; it’s an exhausted sound, clumsy, as though she is so, so tired of being sad. “I’m sorry,” she manages. “I’m sorry.”

There is a lump in Buffy’s throat as she moves closer to Ms. Calendar. “I miss him,” she says in a small voice. “He was supposed to—he should have been here for longer.”

“I know.” Ms. Calendar moves to cover her face with her hands again, then utters a small, pained gasp; she’s placed pressure on her bad wrist.

Buffy stares at Ms. Calendar, still covered in bruises and scrapes from when she’d been thrown, hard, against the mausoleum floor. She thinks about how, finding out about Angelus, she’d thrown Ms. Calendar up against a desk, leaving a ring of purple around Ms. Calendar’s neck that no amount of scarves or concealer could properly disguise. She reaches over and takes Ms. Calendar’s good hand, holding it tightly, and then, for the first time since her Watcher’s death, she starts to really, really cry.

* * *

 

Ms. Calendar usurps New Watcher’s position. She does it sneakily, and with a lot of letters to old friends of Giles’s, but all of a sudden New Watcher is under the “instructive tutelage” of Actually Very New Watcher Ms. Calendar, who’s going to be taking over the care and keeping of the Sunnydale High library. They’re looking for a new computer teacher in the interim, Buffy hears, but no one can really replace Ms. Calendar.

Buffy thinks she agrees with that.

“Hey, smarty, you forgot your biology textbook in your locker,” says Ms. Calendar on Monday, giving Buffy a crooked smile as she breezes into the library. Her arm is in a sling, but she’s wearing a brightly colored blouse and a nice pair of slacks, and her complexion doesn’t look quite as bloodless anymore. It’s taking her a while, recovering from the magics she’d been trying to work, but…she’s managing. Slowly. “I had to sweet-talk Snyder into letting me have your combination.”

“Did you manage it?”

Ms. Calendar hands over the textbook in question. “You should be _studying,_ ” she says, and bops Buffy on the nose with her index finger. Buffy smiles a little, and at the library table, she hears Willow and Xander both giggling at her expense. “You are in the prime of your life, Buffy, at least according to colleges, and they’re watching you pretty thoroughly—”

“This is the most boring pep talk ever,” Buffy informs her. “Did being a librarian make you boring? Is that just something that happens, like, magically, when someone steps into a library? ‘Cause Giles was all ticking-time-bomb demon-summony guy before this—”

And this is the biggest change: Giles stays tangible, and not some locked-away part of their past that they avoid as best they can. Ms. Calendar smiles, tired and proud, at the mention of his name, and Buffy feels a warmth in her chest; they carry the happy memories with them, and remember how much they were loved.

**Author's Note:**

> soooo i have some vague half-formed ideas re: new watcher jenny grieving giles, and as such might return to this 'verse at a later date. i'm also very happy to have finally written this fic, because i've had this idea for a while now. it feels so great to have finally explored it.


End file.
